


oh, mother, make me

by sleep_is_good_books_are_better



Series: Sig's Bad Things Happen Bingo (aka Torture Tekēhu Week) [3]
Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, All Hurt Some Comfort, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Memory Loss, Naked Cuddling, Torture, in other news: the emperor is a dick, is it really processing trauma if you don't remember it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 21:04:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20453543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleep_is_good_books_are_better/pseuds/sleep_is_good_books_are_better
Summary: Dev'essian tightens his grip on his lightsaber. "How is it possible for someone to be a Child of the Emperor and not know it?"Her smile is a dangerous, glittering thing, all gleaming teeth and sharp edges. "The mind is a powerful force, Barsen'thor, especially when it comes to things we wish to forget."





	oh, mother, make me

Head pounding. Wrists throbbing. The blood dripping down her arm feels cool against her burning skin. There’s a roaring in her ears that almost drowns out the sound of the man who’s beating her.

Ihl’essa doesn’t know what’s going on anymore. Hasn’t for a while.

The thwack of leather against skin. Pain blooms on her cheek. Her head collides with her arm and ringing joins the roaring in her ears.

Everything is spinning. Why is everything spinning?

“-power, you useless slave!”

Her head lolls to the other side of her neck. Her eyelids peel back from her eyes like the skin on her side.

“I-I-“

The jab of a charged rod into her back. Her whole body seizes against the restraints.

“The Force, use the Force!”

_No no no can’t do that mustn’t do that._

_Mama said so. _

Her insides clench against the power in her blood. Overseer takes his rod and lays down a line of fire along her ribs instead. Blood spurts out of her mouth to join the flecks of dull red already on the floor. Her lips are dry and peeling and splitting at the seams.

When was the last time she ate? When was the last time her throat pushed against something that wasn’t her own fluids?

The strikes stop, for a moment, and she allows her head to sag on her shoulders. The stretch pulls the lash welts on her back open again. She barely feels the blood sink into the tattered cloth hanging around her. There’s not enough left there to feel.

The ringing in her ears settles back to a dull thud.

“-this isn’t working-“

“-he doesn’t accept failure, we need to try something else-“

“-they’ve brought her in already-“

“-what if she really is nothing-“

“-see soon enough-”

The words, Ihl’essa understands them, but she can’t string their meaning together into anything comprehensible. What does it matter? They’ll just keep hurting her. Her head’s getting fuzzy again. Soon it’ll just be like a cloud. Besides. What can they do to her that they haven’t already tried? Skin, nails, hair, they grow back.

Now her blurry vision is starting to go grey at the edges. Maybe, if she’s lucky, she’ll pass out.

There’s the sound of hydraulic locks opening. Light strikes the back of her eyes like a needle and she slams them closed. What’s going on? What’s happening? Her head is smoke, roiling on a stick.

“Lessa, Lessa, darling, can you hear me? Lessa?”

Ihl’essa’s blood is freezing, frigid, so cold it burns. She tries to open her eyes but her eyelids won’t move fast enough. It can’t be it can’t be it can’t be it can’t be she’s not real she’s not real she’s not real she can’t be-

“Lessa?”

It _is. _

_She _is.

“Ma-“

“No, no, darling, don’t talk.” And she doesn’t want to, doesn’t know how she manages to push the words past her parched throat and her missing teeth and her bleeding tongue.

“Ma-ma-“

“_Ihl’essa._”

She blinks, once, twice, and then more after she loses count, trying to pull Mother into focus. This isn’t real, it can’t be real. She’s just an illusion, a phantom, a mirage. There’s no way she’s here. She _can’t _be.

Hands frame her face as light as starlight.

“I don’t know what they want but whatever it is, I’ll give it to them, you’ll be all right, I promise – oh, Ihl’essa, what have they done to you?”

Ihl’essa tries to shake her head but it just makes everything spin. No, no, they don’t want you. They want me. But the words won’t come.

The door slides open again and Overseer strides in. Mother turns around, her hair striking Ihl’essa’s face, but all she can smell is copper and iron and used fusion cells. There’s nothing else left.

Mother shoves Ihl’essa behind her, puts her arms out like she’s a shield. Overseer doesn’t do anything at first, just stands there, puts a hand to his ear like he’s waiting for something.

There’s nothing to hear. Nothing beyond the roaring in her ears, the thud of the door slamming shut. And yet the words come, deep and dark and terrible.

** _Kill. Her._ **

No.

The bones of her wrist catch at the restraints as she pulls against them, twisting, pulling, fighting.

nononononono_no_

There is a moment when everything freezes. The air pulled into her lungs is cold and clear and she can see everything.

Overseer’s hand as it catches Mother’s hair. The creak of leather as he pulls her towards him. Her feet, scrabbling at the floor. The gleam of his lightsaber as he pushes one end against her cheek. The whites of Mother’s eyes, desperately meeting her own. The hum, as he turns his lightsaber on.

The light in her eyes, as they fade to a dull, dim, brown.

**NO NO NO NO _NO_**

Something in her chest explodes. There’s a rushing sensation, like she’s caught in the middle of a storm, but then her anger sweeps her up and she is no longer caught in the storm she _is _the storm and then there is nothing, just anger and pain and _power_. The restraints on her wrists shatter into a million dancing, gleaming shards and it is nothing to direct those shards at Overseer, to hold him in place while a glittering vortex peels the meat from his bones. The door crumbles and the window bursts and the walls begin to shake. There is nothing holding her there will be nothing holding her she will never be _held _again

Now that Mother is dead-

No. NO. _NO._

Pain is better. Anger is better. She will rip and shred and cut. She will bleed and burn and shatter the world into a million pieces until it looks like the twisted wasteland that her chest has become. There’s screaming filling her ears, but she doesn’t realize it’s coming from her. Her throat doesn’t hurt anymore. Neither does her back or her arms or her side. Pain is nothing. Pain is power and power is strength. Power is freedom.

There are people coming towards her but she pulls them apart. The scent of copper and iron fills her nose but it is still not enough to drown out the hum of power crystals. The zing of ignition. So she pulls and tears and tugs on the walls until they crumble beneath her grip. Everything, everything will fall. Everything will burn. Everything-

The end of a lightsaber hits the back of her neck, and everything goes black.

* * *

When Ihl’essa wakes up again, she almost forgets what happened. Forgets until the smell of copper fills her nose and the memory of umber eyes fading to brown comes back. Her eyes snap open and she _pulls, _but the storm is gone. She can feel it, just barely, beneath her skin, but she can’t drag it out. When she tries, it burns, from her wrists down to her feet. She tugs and tugs and tugs but she can’t get out, can’t move a muscle out from under whatever Force they’ve used to put out her storm.

Then she looks up, and everything in her seizes.

The man in front of her, he isn’t a man, he’s a void. Some great darkness, so large she can’t comprehend its magnitude, stretches out before her, ready to swallow her whole.

The same dark, deep voice comes again, echoes out of the vacuum like something from the depths between stars.

**_Hold her still_. **

The hand he raises is calm and steady as can be, precise as a med-droid’s scalpel.

And then a seam on Ihl’essa’s forehead splits open. Blood burns as it drips into her eyes. Deep inside her, the Force twists and bends and tangles into knots.

She screams until her throat starts bleeding.

* * *

Scourge watches dispassionately as the starving skeleton of a girl drops limply to the floor. There’s a dry, rust-colored patch on the back of her neck that matches the crusty blood drying on the end of his lightsaber. She groans as she struggles to turn her head so her bleeding forehead doesn’t press against the cold, hard tile, allowing him to take a closer look at her features. Scourge tilts his head, tries to recall the green of her eyes. He could almost believe… but no. Though it bears a striking resemblance, her face is not the face from his vision. It’s too young, for one, and now… he glances at the red lines that trace their way across her face and along her limbs, the still-oozing remnants of the Emperor’s ritual. Then he thinks back to the lattice-work of scars that covered the right side of the woman’s face in his vision – surgical scars, he has noted, their position and depth decided by necessity rather than sadism – and decides that for all her similarities, this Ihl’essa Lokk will never be the one to strike the Emperor down.

Not now, at least, when he has so effectively collared and leashed her.

“Scourge.”

Scourge turns from the half-dead body on the floor to observe his master.

“See to it that she is returned to the slave pits, once the medical droids have ensured her survival.” The Emperor’s voice takes on a lilting undertone, and Scourge knows that whatever face is left under his master’s bandages is smiling. “Time will tell if she will yet become Sith.”

The Emperor says nothing of her memories, of her ability (or not) to tell others of what she has experienced. Scourge has seen it in enough of the Emperor’s Children to know what will become of the girl’s recollections. The mind is capable of incredible lies, after all, even to itself.

Scourge says none of this, of course. He only does what he has done many times over these last 300 years: he nods obediently and turns to do as he has been told, and, all the while, he _waits_.

* * *

“If you want to know about the scars, Andronikos, just ask.”

They’re lying in her cabin aboard a blessedly quiet _Aphelion_, the sheets still tangled under their bare skin. Ihl’essa punctuates the question with a raised eyebrow, directed at the pirate who, moments ago, was tracing his gaze along the lines of ropy scar tissue that run across her skin.

Andronikos just sends a raised eyebrow of his own right back. He’s resting his head on his hands, which bunches up his biceps in a manner that is annoyingly distracting. “How do you know _that’s _what I want to ask about? Maybe I got something else in mind.” The corners of his lips tug up into an expression that, on anybody else, Ihl’essa would describe as a leer, but somehow the word doesn’t fit his face.

She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t pull away from where she rests on her elbow next to him. “Everyone _always_ does. Ask, I mean,” she says quickly, in response to his widening grin.

He tugs on her free arm until she collapses against him. A bit forward, but she’ll allow it. “Fine, Sith, I’ll bite. How’d you get the scars.”

As she rests her cheek against his chest, Ihl’essa realizes what Andronikos has done. Now she doesn’t have to look at him. If she doesn’t want to.

She keeps her gaze somewhere to the left of his nipple as she speaks. “I was twelve, maybe thirteen. It was… six months? I believe? Six months since my mother died. We were in a mine, there was an accident,” she says when he inhales sharply. “Anyway, I had been… sent to a wealthy noble man, a Sith Lord. He wanted a pretty little thing to pour his drinks and scrub his floors. Not a particularly horrible job, all things considered, especially when compared to the mines, but he had these daughters.” A huff of laughter escapes her mouth, but there’s no humor there. “You would have liked them. Beautiful, powerful, _sadistic_.” He tenses slightly underneath her, and Ihl’essa thinks she just might love him for it. Without quite meaning to, she finds her hand rubbing against his flat stomach. As if to reassure him that she knows. “They caught me one day, while I was cleaning their rooms. Decided to have some fun with me.” Now she’s the one who’s tense. She can feel the rigor mortis slowly climb up her muscles as she remembers. “They held me down, and cut me up, and laughed while I screamed.” She can barely fit the mirthless grin onto her tensed cheeks. “When their father found out, oh, he was not pleased. So he took me and made me pretty again.” She gestures to the scars lining her body, their graceful loops and elegant angles, and tries to relax against Andronikos. It does her no good to allow ancient history to hurt her. “Not pretty enough, I suppose, since he… sent me away not long after. And now I’m here.”

Now she’s here, a Sith Lord with a not inconsiderable amount of power, both politically and in the Force. It’s crossed her mind, now and then, that she could probably track that old man down and find his daughters. That she could probably kill them, and no one would stop her.

Andronikos’ lips land on the raised skin of her forehead as lightly as a butterfly. Ihl’essa feels her heart flutter in her chest, like a bird beating its wings against the bars of a cage.

“So, what, Sith? Want me to kill them for you?” His voice is rough and deep, but his breath is warm against her ear.

She cranes her neck back so that she can look him in the eyes. “Somehow, I think I’ll manage.” She pulls herself up, just so that she can press her lips to his. Laying here, pressed against him, it is difficult to find the anger. The whole memory feels greasy, hard to hold on to, as if it happened to someone else, some other scared little girl who didn’t understand the power in her blood.

Ihl’essa smiles wryly against Andronikos’ lips. “Besides, I do believe we rather have our hands full at the moment.” The lights of Dromund Kaas gleam in the window display, and somewhere on the planet below, Thanaton waits for his chance to kill her. 

Andronikos grins at the glint in her eyes. “I know that look, Sith. Time to pay ol’ Thanaton a visit?”

Ihl’essa’s own smirk grows into something toothy and vicious. Power surges through her body as she pushes herself up to kiss him one last time, and, in this moment, she is wonderfully, blessedly, incredibly _free_.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: in this universe, my canon Jedi Knight is Ihbara Lokk, aka Ihl'essa's twin sister, though neither of them learn about this until well into the events of KOTET. (Ihbara was not happy, to say the least.)


End file.
